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In the pre-conclave meetings there was much discussion about how to follow up or not on the processes set in motion by Pope Francis regarding the government of the Church. And everyone is now waiting to see what the new pope will decide.
The Vatican curia is one of these areas of change that have remained unfinished. And here Leo (in the photo, on the cathedra of the basilica of St. John Lateran) has given a first signal of continuity, with the appointment on May 22 of a woman, Sister Tiziana Merletti, as secretary of the dicastery for institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life, the same dicastery at which back on last January 6 Francis had installed as prefect another nun, Simona Brambilla, albeit flanked by a cardinal guardian, the Spaniard Ángel Fernández Artime, with the anomalous position of pro-prefect.
Leo’s appointment of an ordinary baptized woman to a key position in the Roman curia was presented by the media as a further step in the modernization of the government of the Church. But thereby entirely neglecting a capital question connected to it, discussed back at Vatican Council II but to this day without a clear solution.
The one who brought this issue into focus in the pre-conclave meetings was above all the over-eighty cardinal Beniamino Stella, in a talk that caused a stir due to the severity of his criticisms aimed at Pope Francis.
Stella, a longtime diplomat and expert in canon law, was among Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s favorites at the beginning of his pontificate, but was then sidelined by him for the evident incompatibility of their respective visions.
Well then, Stella did not only contest the monarchical absolutism with which Francis had governed the Church, systematically violating the fundamental rights of the person and modifying as he pleased and in a disordered manner the norms of canon law. But in addition he reproached him for having wanted to separate the powers of orders, meaning those stemming from the sacrament of episcopal ordination, from the powers of jurisdiction, that is, those simply conferred by a higher authority, opting for the latter in order to put even the ordinary baptized, men and women, at the head of key offices of the Vatican curia and therefore of the government of the universal Church, with the simple mandate of the pope.
In reality, this last move, rather than a sign of modernization, was in the judgment of Stella and of many authoritative canonists a return to a questionable practice typical of the Middle Ages and the modern age, when it frequently happened that a pope would confer on abbesses powers of government equal to those of a bishop, or would assign the care of a diocese to a cardinal who had been ordained neither bishop nor priest.
Going further back, throughout the first millennium these forms of transmission of power disconnected from the sacrament of orders were unknown. And it is precisely to the original tradition that Vatican Council II wanted to return, in the dogmatic constitution on the Church “Lumen gentium,” recovering the awareness of the sacramental nature, before jurisdictional, of the episcopate and of the powers connected to it, not only those of sanctifying and teaching, but also that of governing.
At the Council, those who voted against this reform were just over 300 out of about 3,000. But with the remaking of the curia desired by Pope Francis, the winners were once again the opponents back then. Today they are criticized, not by chance, precisely by the most progressive and “conciliar” theologians, as Cardinal Walter Kasper recently did.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Cardinal Stella’s criticisms should have provoked strong reactions among the defenders of Pope Francis, some of whom, protected by anonymity, even accused him of “treason.”
With the appointment of Sister Merletti as secretary of the dicastery for religious, Pope Leo, he too very competent in canon law, has shown instead that he does not want to distance himself, on this controversial question, from the option adopted by his predecessor.
Notwithstanding that Leo does not want to replicate in any way the unbridled monarchical absolutism with which Francis governed the Church, as he promised in the homily at the inaugural Mass of his pontificate: “without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him.”
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Another “terra incognita” on which Pope Leo is expected to prove himself is precisely that of a government of the Church that is not unrestrainedly monarchical but collegial, synodal, conciliar.
Here too, Pope Francis acted in a contradictory way, with a torrent of words and an unconcluded and inconclusive synod in support of “synodality,” but in fact with an ultra-solitary exercise of the power of government.
In particular, in the pre-conclave meetings the future pope had been urged from many sides to restore to the cardinals that role of collegial council of the successor of Peter that Pope Francis had completely eliminated, no longer convening any real and proper consistory after the one, which came out to his disliking, of February 2014 on the disputed question of communion for the divorced and remarried.
But it is above all on the future of the synod of bishops that Pope Leo is in the hot seat.
In the pre-conclave meetings, numerous criticisms had been expressed about the process of mutation of the synod set in motion by Pope Francis. The most impactful was the in-depth contribution – which he made public in Italian and English – of the 93-year-old Chinese cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, according to whom the change in nature impressed on the synod of bishops “risks bringing us closer to the Anglican practice,” and therefore it would be up to the future pope “to allow the continuation of this synodal process or to decisively break it off,” since “it is a matter of the life or death of the Church founded by Jesus.”
Weighing on what Pope Leo may wish to decide are above all the steps taken by the synod’s leadership team in the last days of Francis’s life, establishing a detailed schedule for the continuation of the assembly, step by step, even up to October 2028 and an unspecified concluding “ecclesial assembly.”
This schedule was made public on March 15 with a letter to all the bishops signed by Cardinal Mario Grech, secretary general of the synod, and given as “approved by Pope Francis,” who at that time was hospitalized in very serious condition at Gemelli General.
And four days after the election of Robert F. Prevost, a second letter, this time also signed by the two undersecretaries of the synod, Sister Nathalie Becquart and the Augustinian Luis Marín de San Martín, was addressed to the new pope with the transparent intention of urging him to continue on the path undertaken.
But it is not at all a given that Pope Leo – who on May 26 received Cardinal Grech in audience – must stick to the schedule set, with the approval of his predecessor, by the leadership of the unfinished synod on synodality.
It is possible that he may instead decide to bring this synod to an end on a shorter timetable, opting for a form of synodality that does not conflict with that established by Paul VI following Vatican Council II and is consistent with the hierarchical structure of the Church.
This also in order to allow the synods to return to their natural dynamic, which is to address and resolve each time a specific question, chosen as significant for the life of the Church.
On May 14 and 15, an important conference was held at the Pontifical Gregorian University on the theme: “Toward a Theology of Hope for and from Ukraine,” at which a request of this very kind was made to Pope Leo: to convene “an extraordinary synod of bishops to discuss and clarify the ambiguous or ambivalent doctrinal questions of war and peace.”
The conference was introduced by Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and the major archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Sviatoslav Shevchuk. But it was the main speaker, Professor Myroslav Marynovych, president of the “Religion and Society” institute at the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, who made explicit his request to Pope Leo for a synod to clarify this crucial issue.
From Augustine onward, the social doctrine of the Church has always admitted that a “just” war can be fought, under certain conditions.
But that today this question is in the grip of confusion is clear for all to see, in the name of a widespread and compliant pacifism but also due to the responsibility of Pope Francis and his incessant invectives against all wars, all of which he discredited without exception (and poorly balanced with his rare admissions of the justice of a defensive war).
That Pope Leo is very sensitive to the need for a constant fine-tuning of the social doctrine of the Church is proven by the address he gave on May 17 to the “Centesimus Annus” foundation: a social doctrine – he said – that must not be imposed as an indisputable truth, but matured with critical judgment and multidisciplinary research, with a serene engaging of “hypotheses, discussions, progress and setbacks,” through which to reach “a reliable, organized and systematic body of knowledge about a given issue.”
Peace and war is a dramatically current matter for an engagement of this type, in today’s Church. And who knows if Pope Leo may not really dedicate a synod to it.
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
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POSTSCRIPT— From Switzerland, Martin Grichting points out that with regard to the separation between the power of orders and the power of jurisdiction, brought back to unity by Vatican Council II, Joseph Ratzinger had also expressed himself clearly in support of unity, in his book Democracy in the Church: Possibilities and Limits, published together with Hans Maier.
For Ratzinger, the “de facto separation between the power of orders and that of government” was “absolutely inadmissible.” This because such a separation relegates the sacrament “to the magical” and ecclesiastical jurisdiction “to the profane”: “The sacrament is thus understood only ritually and not as a mandate to guide the Church through the word and the liturgy; government, instead, is seen as a purely political-administrative affair – because the Church itself is obviously seen only as a political tool. In reality, the office of pastor in the Church is an indivisible ministry” (quoted from the Topos edition, Limburg-Kevelaer 2000, p. 31 ff.).
For further arguments in support of this thesis, see what Grichting has written recently.
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Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.